When the Sun Turned Black

Major "Chuck" Sweeney had an extremely risky takeoff before dawn, loaded as he was with the 4.5-ton A-bomb, "Fat Man". Now they were over their primary target, Kokura. He had made three runs over the hopelessly clouded city when he made a shocking discovery: the auxiliary gasoline pipe was blocked. Unless they dropped the bomb soon, they would never get home. He turned his plane southwest for the secondary target, "Nagasaki, urban area".

His B-29 was over Shimabara just before

11 A.M. A radio announcer saw this and excitedly broadcast a warning, and Nagasaki people who heard him ran for their shelters. Moments later, Sweeney and his crew saw Nagasaki right below them through a cloud break, immediately recognizing the Urakami River and the Matsuyama Sports Ground. That put them almost two miles northwest of the planned drop, but time had run out. Bombardier Kermit released the bomb. It was just 11 A.M. when Fat Man went plummeting down onto the city of two hundred thousand souls, of whom more than seventy thousand would die, many without a trace.

Inside the Urakami Cathedral, Fathers Nishida and Tamaya were hearing confessions again after the all-clear. The cathedral was only a third of a mile from where Fat Man detonated and was reduced to rubble in an instant. No one would be sure how many perished inside.

Less than two miles away from the cathedral, Chimoto-san was working on his rice paddy on Mount Kawabira. He heard a noise, looked up and saw a B-29 emerging from the clouds. It disgorged a huge black bomb, and he threw himself to the ground. He waited a minute. Then came an awful penetrating brightness, followed by eerie stillness. He looked up and gasped at the huge pillar of smoke, swelling grotesquely as it rose. Suddenly he realized that a hurricane was rushing toward him. Houses, buildings, trees were being cut down before his startled eyes as if by some enormous, invisible bulldozer. Then came a deafening roar, and he was hurled like a matchbox into the stone wall sixteen feet behind. Shaken to his very soul, he gaped at the pines, chestnuts and camphor laurels torn from the ground or broken off at the trunks. Even the grass was gone!

Midori's nineteen-year-old cousin Sadako Moriyama had just found her two small brothers chasing dragonflies in the Yamazato school yard. She told them their mother wanted them. At that moment, she heard the plane and ran with them to the school shelter. As they entered, they were picked up and hurled to the far wall, and she blacked out. Coming to, she heard the two children whimpering at her feet and wondered why it was so dark. As a little light began to penetrate the gloom, she was paralyzed with terror. Two hideous monsters had appeared at the shelter's entrance, making croaking noises and trying to crawl in. As the darkness lifted a little, she saw they were human beings who had been outside when the bomb exploded. In less than seconds, they had been skinned alive, half a mile from the epicenter, and their raw bodies had been picked up and smashed into the side of the shelter.

She went outside. The light was weak, as if it were barely dawn. She cried aloud when she saw beside the sandbox four children, without clothes or skin! She stood there transfixed, her eyes involuntarily drinking in the hideous details. The skin of their hands had been torn away at the wrists and hung from their fingernails, looking like gloves turned inside out.

Feeling she was losing her reason, she dashed back into the shelter, accidentally brushing the two victims still squirming and moaning near the entrance. Their bodies felt like potatoes gone rotten. Their horrible animal croaking sound began again. She realized they were saying something. Mizu, mizu. Water, water. That cry was to run like a cracked record in the nightmares of Nagasaki survivors for years.

Michiko Ogino was ten years old and enjoying the summer holidays at home. Just after 11 A.M. she was terrified by a giant lightning flash, followed by a horrendous roar, and within seconds she was one of the thousands pinned under the roofs or walls of their homes. The blast of the bomb caused air to rush from the epicenter at over a mile a second, knocking houses flat. Almost immediately, an equally violent wind rushed back into the vacuum left at the epicenter.

Michiko was hopelessly pinned there, but her screaming brought a stranger who freed her. Outside, she was startled to see evil-looking clouds that twisted and writhed and blackened out the sun. 'What kind of new lightning had done this? Then she became conscious of a tiny voice becoming hysterical. It was her two-year-old sister trapped under a crossbeam. She turned for help and saw dashing toward them a naked woman, her body greasy, and purple like an eggplant, and her hair reddish brown and frizzled. Oh no! It was Mother! The speechless Michiko could only point to her sister under the beam. The mother looked wildly at the fires that had already started, dived into the rubble, put her shoulder under the beam and heaved. The two-year-old was free, and the mother, hugging her to her breast, collapsed onto the ground. There was no skin left on the shoulder that she had put under the beam, just raw bleeding meat. Michiko's father appeared, badly burnt too. He watched in dumb helplessness as his wife groaned and struggled to rise. Then all her strength ebbed away, and she collapsed, dead.

Nagasaki was now burning, and Sakue Kawasaki sat in disbelief inside the Aburagi air-raid shelter. He could see people staggering about outside, naked and swollen like pumpkins. Then came a babel of croaking voices piteously begging for mizu, mizu, but where could he get water? There was a puddle of dirty water outside the entrance to the shelter, and one of the victims crawled over, lowered his lips into it and drank with succulent noises. He tried to crawl to the shelter but collapsed and stopped moving. One by one, the others drank from the puddle and crumpled up motionless. What terrible thirst could drive men to act like demented lemmings?

The plutonium-239 bomb exploded in Nagasaki with the equivalent force of twenty-two thousand tons of conventional explosives but with vast differences. Setting aside for the moment the A-bomb's lethal radiation, there was its intense heat, which reached several million degrees centigrade at the explosion point. The whole mass of the huge bomb was ionized and a fireball created, making the air around it luminous, emitting ultraviolet rays and infrared rays and blistering roof tiles farther than half a mile from the epicenter. Exposed human skin was scorched up to two and a half miles away. Electric light poles, trees and houses within two miles were charred on the surface facing the blast. The velocity of the wind that rushed out from the epicenter was more than one mile per second, sixty times the velocity of a major cyclone. This caused a vacuum at the epicenter, and another cyclone rushed back. in, picking up acres of dust, dirt, debris and smoke that darkened the writhing mushroom cloud.

Young Kata-san was walking his cow on a hillside outside Oyama, five miles south of the epicenter. He was startled by the flash and watched, rooted to the spot, as a huge white cloud rose up like a grotesque organism fattening itself by some weird magic. The cloud was white on the outside but fired by some hideous red energy within. Then came alternating flashes of red, yellow and purple. Gradually the cloud went into a mushroom shape, and a black. stain grew on its stem. When the cloud reached a great height, it burst open and collapsed like an obscene grub that had gorged on more than its stomach could hold. The mountains all around were lit by the sun, but the area below the cloud was shrouded in darkness. Then came Kato's second shock, a roar of wind so strong that Kato mistook it for another bomb exploding nearby.

Stay in denial if you like. There are whole books on this subject that quote at length Allied commanders, from Eisenhower to Nimitz to Mac Arthur, to quite the opposite effect.

Regardless, how can anyone say that modern warfare methodology doesn't virtually constitute an inherent war crime? Even with the best of initial intentions, all modern combatants seem to be incapable of not escalating to very morally shaky tactics in pretty short order. Gone are the days when even defensive warfare could even potentially be directed solely at combatants. But this is due to tactical choices, not inherent issues concerning legitimate self-defense. Modern warfare, as practiced for at least 100 years, is virtually incapable of being conducted in a moral fashion. I believe that everyone willingly partaking of the blood-lust that leads to atrocities will have to answer for them. I certainly believe that everyone involved in the decision to use atomic weapons against civilian populations in an already-defeated Japan, having already met his Maker, was, shall we say, rendered "uncomfortably speechless" at that portion of his particular judgment. Maybe God was more merciful to them than they were to their victims, but I'm glad that I definitely won't be put in the same hot seat for those same actions! I have more than enough to answer for already!

This is the Religion Forum. I am interested in hearing a religiously-based defense of the deliberate killing of civilians in wartime, from a Christian perspective. One that would make Jesus proud to give full approbation to it. I strongly suspect that there will be no such defense forthcoming that does not engage in disingenuous mumbo-jumbo.

Uh-huh. We didn’t deal them terrible blow ‘cause we were bored and there was nothing on TV. There was a reason. Folks need to consider the adversary’s actions that precipitated it. They need to consider the other options that were available.

Hundreds of thousands, millions are going to die. That’s given. Whether they die in one big bang or a billion smaller ones, is human suffering not at least equal?

IMO, Best to end it in 1 or 2 big bangs, shatter their will to fight immediately than to slog through the entire country for years fighting battles in every town.

One punch knockout. Done. Lost quick, and hurt a lot but when they woke up they didn’t have a pumpkinhead, 2 black eyes, mouthful of broken teeth, ear missing, fractured ribs, and a broken ankle too.

The conditions, by May 1945, were pretty much restricted to keeping Hirohito on the throne. They weren’t in much of a position to bargain, but that didn’t matter. We, for polemic reasons, were entirely dug-in about “Unconditional Surrender,” which we stated as a goal somewhat earlier. If anything, stupid usage of such terminology only tends to make the enemy fight more desperately. It is therefore rather amazing that the Japanese wanted so few conditions by mid-1945.

They never cry for the 300,000, many of them Christian Chinese, that were killed in Nanking.

Do you know how many Chinese POW's taken by the Japanese were still alive when Japan finally surrendered? 56. Not 56 hundred or 56 thousand. Just 56. By order of by Emperor Hirohito there were no constraints of international law on the treatment of Chinese POW's.

Ah there’s the issue isn’t it:

“I certainly believe that everyone involved in the decision to use atomic weapons against civilian populations in an already-defeated Japan..”

It may have been an inevitably-defeated Japan, but not one willing to surrender unconditionally...and there is absolutely no evidence that before August 6th Suzuki’s War Cabinet would have voted to surrender unless:

1. No occupation
2. No war trials by the allies
3. Emporer is left untouched

Please keep your delusional lies to yourself...regardless of your “Christian” intentions oh Pharisee...

That was the total war doctrine...and both the axis and the allies did it.

It was in part an artifact of the armaments of the era, but also of the philosophy of the day.

To behave like that today, holding the entire population of a combatant nation as targets in battle would certainly be a war crime, especially since we can fine target those we’re really after. And in WWII all the combatants had some pretty bloodstained hands. I’m not going to cast the rock of who was more guilty, except to remember our side didn’t start the conflict.

So a punch in the face is the same as vivisection. Ok dear.

Some more light reading.

It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers—and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4% chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30%. -Looting of Asia

No they don’t, you’re right. It as disgusting as listening to Germans say the bombing of Dresden was a ‘’war crime’’, never taking into account Warsaw or Rotterdam or Coventry or Auschwitz. I had never known so few Chinese prisoners were left alive at the end of the war. Do you know the Germans murdered 800,000 people at the Treblinka concentration camp. When the Russians liberated it they found three people left alive. Just three out of 800,000.

" They could have been blockaded until the population forced the government to surrender "

How can blockading Japan and therefore, causing the people to slowly starve to death somehow be more compassionate and morally acceptable in the" Christian " view in any war ?
What about what Gen Grant did in Vicksburg ? in the siege of Vicksburg ? , it can safely be assumed that there were many " Christians " who starved to death in that city.
Just explain to us how slowly starving people to death is somehow morally acceptable in the Christian view as you would have layed out the reason to have a seige on Japan compared to dropping 2 a-bombs in Japan.

Murder is the intentional killing of an innocent person. In the context of war, murder is the intentional killing of a non-combatant. Any military action that results in the deaths of non-combatants is therefore murder. And, since it is impossible to conduct war in the modern age without killing non-combatants, a just war cannot exist.

War is evil. That being said, sometimes war is the lesser of two evils. For the record, I would have given the order to firebomb Tokyo, Osaka, and the other cities of Japan, just as Gen. Curtis LeMay did. I would also have given the order to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just as Truman did. However, I would have done so with the full awareness that I was committing murder by doing so. LeMay, the man behind the firebombings of Japan that killed so many innocent civilians, refused to attempt to weasel his way out of what he had done. In an interview conducted after the war, LeMay famously said that "killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier."¹

All war is immoral. LeMay didn't punk out and try to paper over his deeds with a thin tissue of patriotic self-righteousness. He murdered hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and he lived with it. He faced up to the reality of his deeds like a man.

I'm with him. When war comes, let's get it over with as quickly as possible, and then let's beg God for His forgiveness for the sin of taking innocent lives.

The war in the Pacific was far more brutal then anyone wants to remember.

Most of the areas were never under Allied control at the end of the war so there were no film crews to cover what had happened. And unless it is on film some people have trouble picturing it. The best place to find the records is, oddly enough, in Japan. They do not go out of their way to make them known but the records are there. And what they reveal in their dispassionate way is enough to give you unending nightmares.

" But, by the end of the war, we were doing just as many - and more! - war crimes as they ever did. We just happened to win, so you never saw any of our guys in the docket at war crimes tribunals. "

BS !!!!!!!

I doubt very much that American forces were committing the atrocities that the Japanese were doing as I was told by some Filipinos.
The Filipinos told me that the Japanese were taking bayonets to pregnant women, cutting them open, and taking the babies trowing them up in the air and use the gun bayonets to the babies like a pumpkin.

I doubt very much our American troops were doing that.

Were they unanimous? No, of course not. But most of those willing to fight on were merely doing so to try to maneuver to a face-saving position. No Japanese army had been defeated on the home islands for at least the last thousand years. Face-saving is very important in their culture (just look at their baseball, where they often played to a tie so as not to show-up the opponent too much; this mindset has only very recently begun to change BTW). If they could do so by getting at least one "condition" in the surrender terms - the issue of what happens to the emperor - they save face. Some were willing to fight on till they got that condition. That was as much a function of our own stupidity in broadcasting our insistence on "unconditional surrender" as anything else. Tactically, saying such things is foolish, as it usually makes the enemy fight even more desperately, when they stand to "lose everything" if defeated.

The fact of the matter is that no one in Japan just plain wanted to fight to the bitter end, without consideration of any conditions. And they were incapable of mounting any meaningful defense offshore anyway; if it came down to it, we could have simply blockaded them and deprived them of all outside resources if we were so worried about really losing up to a million men. The peace-wing in the government, along with the general population, would have overridden whatever hawks were left in the military in pretty short-order, once blockade-induced privations really kicked in. The evidence is overwhelming that our own military leaders never bought-into that figure of a million casualties, it was purely for public consumption as a justification for dropping the atomic bombs.

War has always been hell for everyone at times...we folks down south of my age can remember the tales told to us and see the remains of the civilian destruction

that’s why slavery or forced servitude sounded good once upon a time after defeat..you lived even after you were vanquished..it was sorta humane

take yer average medieval siege with some hard feelings involved..say involving a sister’s honour or something Medici like:

the overwhelming force outside the wall Sir Kills Alot might tell Sir YerToast inside that if he gives it up now his womenfolk will only be taken as concubines or handmaidens or domestics depending on beauty and fertility (if Lord Big Britches wants to up his gene pool or pay off horny subordinates) and your spawn say under aged 16 will be allowed to live and raised as their own......scout’s honour.. and you and all the men older than mid teens will only be piked or beheaded or hanged...hell, that was a deal to sir doomed and his posse and they were likely to take considering the alternative was to be skinned alive or disembowled and watch yet kids on pikes and babies boiled and whatnot and yer women still raped and violated in every imaginable way

we lull ourselves (not u skeeter..u purty durn smart) into thinking we are different or more humane

we just can afford the indulgence to be humane and puff ourselves up over that and worrying about silly crap like sexism, racism, homophobia, banning foie gras and other bigotry.... let things go Omega man around here and we can get just as wet as the Saxons or Mongols or Longshanks or whomever....we are civilized because we can be...that’s all

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